Teacher professional learning under audit: reconfiguring practice in an age of standards

ABSTRACT

One of the key tenets of the global education reform movement, professional standards for teachers have reshaped different aspects of teachers’ work and learning in many contexts internationally over the past two decades. This paper explores the consequences of neoliberalism for teacher professional learning in contemporary times. The policies and processes built up around teacher professional development and learning as a consequence of contemporary regimes of standards and their dominant conceptualisation of teacher professionalism, constitute particular cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that frame the practice of teacher professional learning. These in turn give rise to some possibilities of practice while limiting others, effectively creating the space within which what counts as 'authentic professional learning' can be enacted. A case study of the interplay between professional standards and professional learning in the jurisdiction of New South Wales, Australia, is presented, via an analysis of publicly available texts generated by the NSW Education Standards Authority explicitly related to teacher professional learning and development. The paper argues that the practice architectures of professional learning in an age of standards work to support instrumental forms of professional learning while constraining the possibility of more authentic or generative forms of professional learning and consequently, teacher professionalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher professional learning
• teacher professional development
• teacher professionalism
• education policy

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a University of Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) Fellowship 2018–2019, and completed during Visiting Fellowships at the Department of Education and Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford. The author would also like to acknowledge the valuable feedback provided on earlier drafts of the manuscript by Meghan Stacey, Helen Proctor, Susan Groundwater-Smith and Matthew Thomas, along with the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Further discussion of these, and the theory of practice architectures, of which they are a key part, is provided below.

2. Australia’s constitution, drawn up in 1901, allocated responsibility for the provision of schooling to the states and territories at Federation.

3. Until 2018, only teachers who entered the classroom in 2004 or later were required to attain or maintain accreditation in NSW.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Sydney SOAR Fellowship 2018-19.